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For the Love of Hank
Since the PC became a way of life at my house I’ve become very disinterested in TV. My husband and daughter always look at me with trepidation when grabbing the TV remote and selecting a channel; they can’t believe it’s so easy for them to get away with parking the thing on some channel or other that most women wouldn’t tolerate in their presence. My husband, who adores all things automotive, always looks at me askance when I just shrug and turn to my laptop when he tunes in to the Speed Channel. He knows that the Speed Channel can put your average housewife to sleep faster than a couple of Xanax bars washed down with a tumbler of Jack Daniels. So why do I let him park on “My Dream Car Garage”? My daughter spends most of her early evening hours shuffling from one syndicated “Simpsons” episode to another; our local stations run no fewer than five separate reruns of the cartoon, at varying times prior to 7 pm. This used to be a bone of contention – I always wanted to watch the news, forcing her to forgo her 6:00 and 6:30 episodes, but not anymore. I can get all the news I want off the Internet, so why bother with the local newscast?
Of course, all of this carefully balanced harmony goes out the window when the Internet goes down. If our ISP can’t keep us hooked up for any reason, the idyllic hours of “Simpsons” episodes and Jay Leno’s efforts to restore a 1967 Oldsmobile come to a crashing halt, and Mom seizes the TV remote with a viselike grip. For the most part our connection is pretty reliable, though, so this doesn’t happen often. And the last time it occurred, my husband and daughter lucked out – they happened to be swimming, so I had the house, and remote, all to myself. Since Hannity and Nancy Grace were a typical sampling of what was on the cable news channels, I decided to try out the independent movie channels. Maybe there’d be some John Waters movie on or something, I thought, or at least something French with swinging dicks in it. Sundance was running some kind of samurai bullshit, so I checked out IFC.
That’s how I discovered that Henry Rollins has turned into Spaulding Gray.
You remember back in the eighties when Spaulding Gray enjoyed a period of being greatly in vogue for his monologues? He was barely more than a standup comic, but slightly less than a stage actor. His stories were humorous and had a comedic flow, but they weren’t jokes in any kind of classical sense. They were just funny stories strung together in an hour-long blabathon. He eventually ended up becoming clinically depressed and throwing himself in a river not far from where I myself live, but when he was doing his standup shows he was so unique they had to invent a new word for him, “monologuist”.
Now, as we all know, while Gray was busy being fashionable, Henry Rollins was busy being an angry, straight-edge punk rocker, first with the much-vaunted Black Flag and then later in the more mature, self-motivation-championing outfit named after Henry himself, the Rollins Band. As Rollins got older he branched out to become more than just a musical performer; he formed his own publishing company, wrote books of essays and poems, and used his band to style himself as a sort of loud and pissed-off version of Dale Carnegie, exhorting his listeners that “If you begin to doubt yourself the real world will eat you alive”. He seemed very grim and serious in all this, though, so a few years ago when I began hearing that he was doing something he called a “spoken-word” show, and that it was actually pretty funny, I was skeptical. I kept meaning to check him out when they recorded his London show and broadcast it on Comedy Central, but since I was busy on the Internet and my husband was glued to the Sultan of Brunei’s Ferrari collection, I never got around to watching it.
So on this fateful night, as I channel-surfed to avoid Internet DTs, I came to rest on Henry Rollins, alone on a stage on IFC. He looked the same as he always has – big and muscular with his eyes kinda bugging out of his head and his nostrils flared - except for the salt-and-pepper hair he’s developed over the last few years. As I watched, he recounted a trip he’d taken on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The food served to him on the train gave him a monster case of food poisoning and he spent a solid week projectile vomiting as the Trans-Siberian chugged its way through the straits.
And it was funny as fuck! I don’t think Jerry Seinfeld could have pulled off a story like this one and been able to bring The_Funny like Rollins did. From his description of the train attendant, a rotten-toothed, barrel-shaped middle-aged woman, to the anecdote about how he figured out what the mysterious clanging sound was that he was hearing every time the train stopped, Henry Rollins made me laugh my ass off.
Part of what makes him funny is finding out that he is actually insecure as a motherfucker and hates it when people don’t like him. His desire to curry favor with the train attendant is what led him to get the food poisoning. Revealing personal vulnerability is extremely dicey for rock stars – in my opinion, the crime of the century took place when Sharon Osbourne signed on the dotted line with MTV and turned her husband, once the most feared man in rock and roll, into a fucking clown. But it works for Rollins, perhaps because he’s obviously got a much tighter grip on his faculties than does Ozzy Osbourne, but more likely because it makes such an interesting dichotomy with the visual effect Rollins presents. He COULD kick the shit out of you, but he really just wants a hug.
Rollins also hosts a talk show about movies on IFC, which I will mostly likely check out the next time my Internet connection goes down. It’s nice to have something to look forward to in the face of deprivation. Henry Rollins makes me laugh. Who knew?
